The Best Design Advice I've Ever Heard

Knowing what to keep and what to leave out is one of the hardest challenges of designing a successful product.

When you live and breathe your product as a power user, you struggle to empathize with a new user.

This happens because the more time you spend with your product, the more you take for granted what’s confusing to a new user.

As a power user, everything feels clear to you.

It’s hard to know which features are critical for new users versus nice-to-haves, or even critical only for power users.

Further, power users often under-appreciate the journey they went on to build the level of knowledge they have today.

Side note: This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be a power user of your product. Quite the opposite. Being out of touch with new users, while bad, is the lesser of two evils. The worse evil is building something that is so out of touch with new users you can’t grow.

This tension is one of the main reasons why products need to be continually reinvented or risk being disrupted. Startups can see dissatisfaction that incumbents structurally can’t.

The best design advice I’ve ever heard to deal with this challenge is:

“If you can’t make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.”

I love this quote because it acknowledges that not all products can realistically be reduced to the standard of being self-evident.

That said, it doesn’t let the product builder off the hook; it still puts the onus on them to make the product self-explanatory.

Making your product self-evident helps everyone–including power users.

For new users, self-evident products reduce the cognitive load of onboarding and help them get value as quickly as possible.

For power users, self-evident products reduce distraction so they can focus on maximizing the value they get from the product.

And if, like many products, you can’t make yours completely self-evident, do the work to empower people to easily figure it out with just a little help.